Rocacorba Daily

Monday January 27, 2014

Curated by Matt de Neef - January 27, 2014

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In this morning’s public holiday edition of the Rocacorba Daily: Simon Gerrans wins his third Tour Down Under, Greipel wins final stage; Nairo Quintana wins Tour de San Luis; Tyler Farrar hit by team car in Argentina; 31 womens teams registered for 2014 season; A big week at the Tour Down Under; Effect of an aero helmet on head temperature, core temperature, and cycling power; Anatomy of a winning sprint.

Simon Gerrans wins his third Tour Down Under, Greipel wins final stage

Victorian Simon Gerrans (Orica-GreenEDGE) has celebrated Australia Day by winning his third Santos Tour Down Under, an all-time record.

Gerrans took the crown by a hard-earned one second margin from 2011 Tour de France champion and compatriot, Cadel Evans (BMC Racing) after wrenching it from his shoulders in yesterday’s hilltop finish at Willunga. Italian Diego Ulissi (Lampre-Merida) was a further four seconds back in third place overall.

Gerrans, the Australian road race champion, signalled his intention to go for a third Tour Down Under win when he won the stage 1 sprint into Angaston.

“It’s been a hard race for me and my team-mates,” said Gerrans who lost the lead to Evans on Thursday’s stage 3 into Stirling. “It’s been difficult to get the ochre jersey back. What a tough week!”

But the final stage wasn’t an all Aussie celebration as German sprinter Andre Greipel (Lotto-Belisol) scorched home to win his 16th Santos Tour Down Under stage, also an all-time record.

“Chapeau to my team-mates, they rode incredibly fast so I could save myself for the last moment,” said Greipel. “This is a very nice victory for us, I had fast legs today and I’m confident in my capacities these days.”

The Adelaide City circuit for stage 6 took the riders over 18 laps of a new 4.7km course around Rymill Park, out through the CBD to Victoria Square and back. Sweeping past some of Adelaide’s key landmarks it provided a fitting finale to a week of first-class action that, organisers say, attracted more than 750,000 fans.

Nairo Quintana wins Tour de San Luis

Nairo Quintana (Movistar) finished safely in the lead bunch on this morning’s seventh and final stage of the Tour de San Luis to win the race’s general classification for the first time.

Quintana took the race lead after the stage 5 ITT in which he finished 16th. Garmin-Sharp’s Phil Gaimon won the opening stage and led the race until the ITT, after which he slipped into second place 26 seconds behind Quintana.

“It’s an important win when it comes to motivation for the rest of the year,” Quintana said. “I didn’t make any specific training for the beginning of the season, though we had expected to start a bit stronger than last year. I had no major problems during my preparations and I felt really well throughout the race.”

This morning’s final stage was won by Lampre-Merida’s Sacha Modolo who managed to hold off Peter Sagan (Cannondale) in the technical, high-speed finale.

Tyler Farrar hit by team car in Argentina

American sprinter Tyler Farrar (Garmin-Sharp) was hit by the Bueno Aires Provincia team car on the sixth stage of the Tour de San Luis yesterday while riding through the convoy, suffering some abrasions as a result.

The director of the Argentinian Continental team was fined by the UCI commissaires for the incident while BMC’s Taylor Phinney took to Twitter to express his disappointment with the team.

Team Buenos Aires Provincia: one rider punches Dehaes in sprint on St 3, and today their team car runs over Tyler Farrar in the convoy. #wtf

31 womens teams registered for 2014 season

The UCI has announced that 31 professional women’s teams have been registered for the 2014 road season. The governing body also announced a provisional team ranking based on the number of UCI points accrued by the top four riders in each team and the team’s performance in the TTT at last year’s world championships.

The top 20 teams in the provisional rankings will gain an automatic invite to the UCI Women’s Road World Cup events and the top 10 teams will automatically get an invite to class 1 events (races with a 1.1 or 2.1 classification).

The top five nations — the Netherlands, Italy, Sweden, the US and Australia — will also get get an invite for their national team to race class 1 events in 2014.

Anatomy of a winning sprint

The following video is an interesting look at what it takes to win a final sprint in a stage of the Tour Down Under. It shows the run in to the finish of stage 4 of this year’s race with Andre Greipel’s power numbers (and more) synchronised on screen.

Assuming the numbers are correct then it would seem Greipel wasn’t pushed to his limit in the sprint, given he’s capable of roughly 1800W in a sprint like this. Still, it was an impressive win and shows good signs for Greipel’s season ahead.

Click here for the full-page video if the embed above doesn’t work on your device.

Effect of an aero helmet on head temperature, core temperature, and cycling power

Aero road helmets were all the rage in season 2013 and now a handful of researchers have published a paper that looks at how these “nonvented aerodynamic helmets” affect the temperature of the rider’s head and gastrointestinal temperature and what impact these changes (if any) have on performance.

The researchers tested “ten highly trained heat-acclimated endurance athletes” at their VO2max and during a 12km self-paced TT in 39 degrees C conditions using both an aero and a regular helmet.

They found that the riders’ head temperature was higher when wearing a non-vented aero helmet (as you might expect) but that gastrointenstinal temperature and heart rate were unaffected by the choice of helmet. Importantly, “the higher [head temperature] that develops when an aero helmet is worn during cycling in the heat does not affect power output or cycling performance during short-duration high-intensity events.”

The French could have done a lot better in WWII if they had recruited the UCI Technical Commission to guard their border against the Germans – no progress would have been made!

Dave

The difference of course is that F1 has a direct interest in the quality of the TV product as TV rights are sold by the season. Formula One Management produces everything in-house, complete with the on-screen graphics, and then sells that world feed to the broadcasters who (unfortunately in the case of Network Ten) add their commentary audio on top.

The UCI does not have any interest in this – not even at world championship events where it is deputised to the event organising committee to sort out! Worse still, cycling has a massive fragmentation of the TV rights situation where each event organiser is free to sort it out for themselves. While the arrangements are usually pretty similar (two to five world feeds – one with only ambient audio and others with commentary in different languages where you get Phil, Paul and Robbie for the TDU or Keeno, Phil and Paul for the TdF) the disorganisation of the group of race organisers means there is no consistent standard for on-screen graphics and no united front who can force an improvement across the board.

Interestingly, one of the aspects involved with producing a world feed is the lack of breaks. Even when the host nation broadcaster is the producer of the world feed commentary (as it is for the TDU) the commentators can’t throw to a break, they can only pause for a second before continuing and then do the same after the break.

There would be an immediate improvement to cycling TV if the race organisers came together and worked out how to sell a WorldTour package with somebody performing something a little similar to a Bernie Ecclestone role heading it up as the global promoter.

Nitro

Excellent points. There are certainly pluses (as well as minuses!) where you have the “Czar” like Bernie E.

I doubt we’ll ever see a similar organisation structure for cycling, but I still hope that someone somewhere starts to “Lead by example / Show what can be done” when it comes to adding some more creativity in broadcasting.

I think the TdF guys (and then by leading, other races follow) do an outstanding job of showing the beauty of the country as well as the race, but when every kid on a skateboard has a GoPro strapped to their head these days, you wonder why the professional media folks don’t push the envelope a little further…

I dont recall if they did it last year, but I remember SRM had a “Live site” on the web a couple of years back where you could track the real time Heart Rate, Cadence and Power outputs of a handful or riders across key stages of the Tour.

Laptop in one hand, TV remote in the other in a very much “do it yourself broadcast merge” way made for interesting viewing…

Dave

The live tracking sites got shut down by the UCI Technical Commission – see my previous comment about WWII.

I do agree that Bernie E has probably had his day with the fact the fraud trial is even happening being bad enough regardless of the result, but he’s accomplished a hell of a lot more good for motorsport than bad – he definitely saved F1 from being wiped out by sports cars in the 1980s. Michele Acquarone looked like potentially becoming a similar figure, but unfortunately the bad stuff caught up with the good a little too soon. If he had kept his business affairs clean and then taken the thawing of relations with the French to the next level (i.e. collaborating with Christian Prudomme to establish some global leadership) it would have been very good for the sport.

On the flip side if we’re talking coverage, it was great for the CyclingNews Tour Tracker to cover the TDU this year. I wouldn’t normally take a backpack when riding to the race on a roadie, but the advantage of having the iPad on hand between race laps was definitely worth it. Optus gets minus points, their 3G coverage in Stirling was so choked I had to rely on a Vodafone wifi dongle!

Sean

Colour me disappointed about the result of that Aero Road helmet study. I was definitely hoping they’d conclude that the increased head temperature has a negative effect on performance. It’s a silly thing to worry about it but I just can’t get behind the appearance of those things.

Dave

I wonder if the results would have been different had they been conducted during pre-TDU training rides in the severe heatwave of two weeks ago?

CapeHorn

Note – They said there results were based on “short-duration high-intensity events.” It would be interesting to see if instead of looking at an 11km circuit, they looked at 40km (or 90, or 180km) distance events instead.